BULAKNA invokes the name of an ancient Filipino warrior who resisted colonial invasion. Portraying the strength and inequality, the film follows Filipino women who nowadays face a new form of colonization: forced migration for work. Domestic workers in foreign countries, thousands of Filipino women support other people’s economies, working as caregivers and leaving their own families behind in their homeland. Trapped in a global logic that turns care into a bargaining chip, they live divided between sustenance and longing, between duty and absence.
“BULAKNA” addresses fundamental issues of our times: the profound social inequality in a post-colonial world, while at the same time touching on the innermost depths of the human being – the value of work, of the body and of its life.
